News

Researchers from Athena Research Center made a strong showing at the 27th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2026), held in Athens, Greece (29 June - 1 July 2026). MDM has been established as a prestigious forum for the exchange of innovative research results in mobile data management, bringing together researchers, engineers, and practitioners to explore new ideas, techniques, and tools. The conference focuses on data management in mobile, ubiquitous, and pervasive computing, and bridges academic and industry research.

 

Athena RC researchers contributed across the full breadth of the programme, from tutorials and workshops to research sessions, demos, and invited talks.

 

Georgia Koutrika, Research Director at the Information Management Systems Institute (IMSI) of Athena RC, delivered the outreach keynote "Will AI Conquer the world - or at least data management?", reflecting on the transformative role of AI in the evolution of data management systems. Theodore Dalamagas, Director of IMSI, moderated the panel "The physical turn: mobile data management in the age of physical AI".  Prof. Evaggelia Pitoura (University of Ioannina & ARCHIMEDES Unit, Athena RC) delivered a keynote "On the many facets of fairness and explainability in data-intensive AI Systems", and received the 2026 MDM Distinguished Contributor Award, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to mobile data management research and her long-standing service to the MDM community.

 

On the research front, Kostas Patroumpas, Alexandros Troupiotis-Kapeliaris, Giannis Spiliopoulos, Panagiotis Betchavas (ARCHIMEDES Unit), Dimitrios Skoutas (IMSI/Athena RC), Dimitris Zissis (University of the Aegean), and Nikos Bikakis Hellenic Mediterranean University, ARCHIMEDES Unit) presented their research on "Context-enriched natural language descriptions of vessel trajectories", exploring AI-driven approaches to generating meaningful, human-readable descriptions of maritime trajectory data. In the MuseKDE Workshop session on Multi-Modal Trajectory Modeling, the team presented their work titled "Trajectory imputation using computer vision models".

 

In the Advanced Seminar session, Dimitris Kyriakopoulos (IMSI/Athena RC), Dimitris Sacharidis (Université Libre de Bruxelles), and Giorgos Giannopoulos (National Observatory of Athens & Athena RC) delivered the tutorial "Spatial fairness in algorithmic decision making: concepts, detection, and mitigation", addressing the growing need for fairness-aware approaches in spatial and location-based algorithmic systems. In the Demos and Posters session, Panagiotis Sklavos and Antonios Deligiannakis (Technical University of Crete & Athena RC) presented a demo "FL-Net-Sim: A practical framework for scalable network simulation of federated systems", a tool designed to support realistic and scalable simulation of federated learning environments.

At the organisational level, Theodore Dalamagas served as Panel Co-Chair of the conference, Dimitrios Skoutas served as a member of the Programme Committee, and Prof. Evaggelia Pitoura served as PhD Dissertation Showcase Co-Chair.

 

For more information about the MDM 2026, please visit the conference website.